Jesse Singal is a contributing writer and former writer-at-large at New York Magazine who you can follow via his newsletter. Or on Twitter. He is working on a book about why half-baked behavioral-science ideas sometimes go viral.

Months away from publishing her debut novel, a young Asian author and rising star of YA fiction just killed her own book to appease a social media mob condemning her work as racist despite the fact that they most likely hadn’t read it